It turns out that intellectual property is the stuff that drives the American economic engine. Oh, man, we so have to stop typing sentences like that. They are painful on so many levels.
NBC Universal went out and did a study on how much IP contributes to the economy. It turns out to be a number with a whole lot of zeroes. More than we can recall, so how ever many a trillion is, that’s what we’re talking about. Without the contributions of motion pictures, music, software, and the like, things would be bleak. We are assuming that books and other writing join other entertainment industries in
. . . “digital convergence industries” along with software and data processing businesses.
The article deals with the need to get serious about piracy. Hmm, seems like we’ve been saying that for some time. The first step remains goal definition. To date, not a lot of careful thought has gone into determining how to protect artists — you know the plan is bad when artists are so safe, their work cannot be used by consumers.
